On the face of it, the charting features included with programs like Excel and Numbers are good enough for most Macintosh users. True, it's easy to tire of Excel's preference for representing everything as a pile of coins or pointy dunce's caps, but in the main, the functionality suffices. That is until you see OmniGraphSketcher and you realise how much more inventive charts can be.

Ignore the unlovely name. This is an elegant, highly flexible program built for producing 2D charts on the fly or based on data from elsewhere. You can adjust the axes to suit in various ways; clicking and dragging end labels in or out, opening the Axis Inspector and typing in specific ranges or importing figures from elsewhere and using the Scale to Fit command to marry everything up.

Chart creation is similarly simple. There are only four commands - Modify, Draw, Fill and Text - which are all pretty straightforward; move between them by clicking the relevant icon or use keyboard shortcuts ('D' for draw, 'F' for Fill) while using the mouse.

OmniGraphSketcher only supports line and bar charts, but the flexibility with which you can paint these straight onto the screen and then refine them using drag and drop or by opening the Data Point Inspector and simply typing in new values goes a long way towards compensating for the lack of conventional chart types.

The program also imports data from programs like Excel or Apple Numbers as well as comma or tab delimited text, and because the actual data points are imported as well, it's easy to amend the raw data and see your changes reflected in the chart.

Where OmniGraphSketcher really comes into its own, though, is as a way to express concepts that don't necessarily need actual numbers; scientific or statistical arguments or something like the classic Laffer curve which is used to demonstrate that increases in taxation don't necessarily result in increases in tax revenues beyond a certain point.

This type of charting is also useful in forecasting, where you want to indicate future trends that stretch beyond any actual recorded data, and can be used in all sorts of other ways, for example to indicate geological layers or express more abstract concepts like goals and boundaries. There's even an example on the web site where it's used to show US airline routes and distances.

Drag and drop doesn't even begin to describe this program. Everything can be picked up and moved with the mouse, including lines, bars, axes and labels, and filling a shaded area under a curve (something that Excel huffs and puffs over) takes only a few mouse clicks.

Once the basic chart is in place, the Inspector makes it easy to change colours, line widths, add drop shadows and so on. Finished charts can be copied and pasted into other programs - Keynote or Word, for example - or exported as a PNG, JPG or PDF for use on the web or in print.

The included 'sandbox' file will teach old hands everything they need to know in a few minutes, while for newcomers, the built-in help is cheery and informative, like having a mate over to explain how the program works over a couple of beers. Now if only they could have a word in someone's ear about adding a few more chart types...

Verdict
OmniGraphSketcher conceals a wide range of graphical tricks beneath a clean, simple interface and the result is an outstanding 2D charting program that costs next to nothing and is beautifully implemented. Statisticians and science-types will also find it a useful, lightweight addition to their software library.

Company: The Omni Group

Contact: 00 1 206 523 4152

Tags: microsoft excel bar chart excel raw data spreadsheet statistics line chart windows